Blog

Thanks to all of you that have been submitting video requests. I’ve been keeping busy as of late but I will be filming as soon as I find some time.

Meanwhile here are a few photos from the SWBMAI Jamboree that we played this past Saturday at the High Noon Saloon here in Madison WI.

This morning I was trying to upload a video to YouTube and ran into all sorts of problems. What the hell is going on over there this week. They’re butchering any video I try to upload. And when I say butcher I’m not talking about their normal, standard butchery, I’m talking unusable crap here. Granted they have the user base that brings in the hits and I’m a big fan of Google but let’s face it the video quality there sucks royally. Due to this frustration I’ve decided to check out the competition. I uploaded the same video file to each site so you can see for yourself how they look, feel and sound.

Vimeo.com: I like the web design of this site. The layout is clean and logical, the upload was fast and the video quality is way better than YouTube.

Sharkle.com: Other than its tragic name, which makes me think of a shart every time I type it, this site isn’t too bad. If you’ve ever shopped for RAM or underwear online you’ll feel right at home with the user interface this website offers.

Blip.tv: This site is very thorough which is cool but it’s way to Microsofty with its bliss-teletubby vibe that I just can’t bring myself to look at it.

Video.google.com: It’s hard to argue with Google and they definitely win the largest resolution award but it seems like it has a way to go still. The interface is classic Google; Very clean and easy. I imagine this will grow considerably and catch on more than any of the above mentioned sites.

Didgu.com: This site hasn’t officially launched yet but has great promise. Unlike the other YouTube clones this site has two major offerings that set it apart. The first is money, yeah that’s right they’re going to pay you for your content through advertising dollars. And the second major advantage is quality. It’s not going to use Flash at all so you can download videos you’ll actually want to watch.

Break.com: We have a winner! This is hands down the biggest shart of them all. Not only is it a really lame meat market but it just flat out doesn’t work. Perhaps it doesn’t like Safari. I don’t know and I don’t care this site sucks the big moist brown one. I’m starting to feel a bit guilty for bad-mouthing YouTube now that I’ve seen how bad it could be. I would welcome a shart over this site any day of the week.

It will be interesting to see what happens with sites like these over the next year. Hopefully the imminent fall of Vista won’t steal all of the headlines.

Note: If you are using Internet Explorer 6 or 7 you may need to right-click the file and select “Save Target As…”

Note: You must first download the videos from this site and then open them in Quicktime in order to slow them down.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with Quicktime one of its best features is the ability to alter both audio and video speed as well as pitch. Just go to the Window menu and select: “Show A/V Controls” (Command+K on Mac or Ctrl+K on PC). Then you can slow down the file without effecting the pitch or if you’re out of tune with a file you can tweak the pitch until you are in tune (This is an invaluable feature when playing along to old recordings especially when the band is tuned up a half step). Or if you find some of the videos on this site painfully slow then you can speed them up to your liking.

When I’m not playing guitar or banjo I can usually be found on my Ludwigs trying like hell to keep time.